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I conducted an interview with an ex-publishing professional who worked for two years at an educational publishing company.
Due to his nondisclosure agreement, I will refer to him using the pseudonym “Joe” or “J” and remove direct references to the company at which he worked.
I omitted little from the interview—this is fascinating stuff!—but I will italicize certain quotes I find especially compelling to enable skimming if necessary.
Joe: Some basic background that might help:
I worked for the K-6 English-Spanish literacy division of —————- for roughly two years. The unit’s core business is elementary reading programs: textbooks, ancillary reading materials, audiovisual components, and online multimedia. My particular business unit focused on online English-Spanish reading and testing programs and audiovisual products—so not textbooks, although —————- and its competitors use their textbooks as the basis for all other programming.
Textbooks have been and remain a critical component of —————- ‘s business, but the encroaching computerization of American classrooms is changing traditional publishing company business models, such that the terms “textbook publisher” or “educational publisher” have largely been supplanted by the curious term “educational services firm.”
Melody Condon: What is your educational background?
J: I hold a BA in Spanish language and literature and history as well as an MA in history.
MC: What is your ideal career?
J: That’s a tough question, and I can’t say that I have a definitive answer to it. I’m currently working toward a PhD in history with the goal of someday teaching on the university level. I don’t know whether teaching and researching is my ideal profession, but it’s certainly something I want to do.
MC: How did you get your job in the publishing industry?
J: Quite by chance, although publishing was an industry in which I previously had considered work. I listed my resume with an online service and received a call from a recruitment agency. The rest was history.
Very few educational publishing companies handle hiring directly these days, at least not for non-senior positions. I was fortunate enough to be taken on as a full-time employee, but many people hired as contract employees when I was taken on fell victim to the industry’s unforgiving production cycle (12-18 months of frantic work followed by a six-month or longer lull) and were let go as soon as major projects were finished. (Contract employment is on the rise in publishing, as it reduces employer costs: lower tax liability, zero benefit payouts).
MC: What did the job entail?
J: I worked as a technology project manager, which meant I wore many hats, but my primary responsibility was managing a small team of graphics and software designers and negotiating projects with third-party vendors, all toward the end goal of updating and maintaining several bilingual online and disc-based interfaces offered by the company. …
Another part of my job involved ensuring that products developed by our technology division appropriately complemented products in the company’s print product line. This meant synchronizing style conventions and, above all, making sure products were designed to individual states’ specifications. (A state government purchasing educational materials charges the company it retains to deliver products with ensuring that the state board of education’s curriculum standards are reflected in the products being purchased. This is an arduous and, at times, acrimonious process). On each project there also inevitably arose issues with rights and permissions, so I was responsible for securing rights to licensed material.
MC: Did you enjoy the job?
J: I liked a number of the people I worked with and learned a great deal from some of them, but I can’t say that I enjoyed the work itself, as I found the “business of educating people” to be far removed from the actual process of educating people. Moreover, I was often left unconvinced that the industry’s push to digitize products already existing in print would accomplish very much pedagogically speaking. The prevailing wisdom in the industry is that digital instruction not only is the wave of the future but also cheaper to provide. The resulting personnel downsizing in publishing, I fear, diminishes product quality, ultimately hindering learning.
MC: One person in my class has expressed concern about the digitization of educational materials in a time when schools and students with limited resources will not be able to afford them. Do you have any comments about how you think this will impact education?
J: Digitization is inevitable and positive (to an extent), but it’s no silver bullet. The reality of unequal resources is one that many school districts and educational publishing companies need to be more honest about. Readying print content for deployment on digital whiteboards or iPads is all well and good, but a great many school districts nationwide simply cannot afford the necessary hardware. Likewise, there are millions of school children whose families cannot afford computers or eReaders, so while the playing field could conceivably be leveled at school, the digital divide at home remains.
I’d also argue that computer technology, while a necessary part of our lives, loses its value much more quickly than a traditional hardbound elementary reading textbook and requires technical maintenance paper books don’t. Computerized learning also comes with costs school districts never see, like staffed 800-number customer support centers and large teams of web administrators who monitor online learning servers, which house assessment products and online books.
I often was perplexed by our company’s sales pitch for our online student and teacher editions (an entire student text available in printable PDF online via subscription), which amounted to “Why buy books for your school when you can buy one access code and print the pages yourself?” There are many problems with this proposed use, not least of which being the simple reality that many students would be left to read from the books on screens, a method I’m not convinced yields the same results as holding a physical book. And while a computer can break down and a printer can run out of toner and an 8 1/2 x 11″ printed text can be easily damaged, a traditional textbook holds up for many, many years. Perhaps companies would be wise to remind consumers that books are advanced technology, too.
MC: What was the most difficult part of that job?
J: Working for a large company with offices spread around the country means you often work closely with people you’ll never meet. It also means that time zones become major factors in day-to-day business (staying late to accommodate the West Coast, arriving early to accommodate the East). I never even met three of the people who reported to me!
Also problematic was the highly political nature of the education industry today. Educational publishing is a lot like the defense industry in that a few firms compete for even fewer contracts, all offered by a single client (the federal government in the case of defense, state and local governments in the case of publishing). The one-two punch of the recent economic slowdown and the general decline of print publishing (and traditional media firms more broadly) means that companies like the one I worked for are completely at the mercy of the state governments they depend on for business. Certainly there are particular products we manufactured that are in demand and that aren’t subject to state agency review (e.g., trade books, national standardized tests), but the majority of the products we sold could be revised or rejected by the states seemingly on a whim—and at considerable expense to the company.
While I was still at the company, the industry was scrambling to snatch up the hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in Texas’s statewide textbook/ed. technology “adoption” (industry term for a large buy). This adoption, slated for academic year 2011-12, may be the last large-scale print textbook contract anywhere in the US, as governments cut funding for education while also moving toward digital education products, including open source materials. (California, a state now exploring an open source curriculum, had to cancel a state adoption of a similar scale to Texas’s due to dire budget problems.) Texas’s curriculum also has the distinction of doubling as the national standard for smaller states that aren’t large enough to fund their own tailor-made product lines. This means that the 15 members of the Texas state BOE have tremendous national influence, and Texas effectively decides what gets taught in classrooms across the country.
Political ideology tends to have less bearing on reading/literacy curricula than on, say, biology product lines, but catering to the Texas state board’s every request, no matter how capricious—a whole printing of our grade 4 textbooks went to press before the board decided they wanted to reduce the books’ margins by 1/4″!—became an all-consuming and costly mission for my company at a time when staff and resources were already drastically reduced. Hundreds of jobs depended on beating out the competition for the contract, and I’m sure the situation was similar for the other houses. When bureaucrats driven by ideology and sales reps fixated on the bottom line dictate the pace and process of a collaborative, expertise-based and design-oriented business, things can quickly go south.
MC: How often would you say that state governments order the alteration of these educational materials after the materials are produced and (supposedly) already finalized? Does that happen frequently?
J: It happens all the time. While there are certain products that meet with state approval quickly, a great many programs go through many, many revisions. Part of this is the nature of publishing—mistakes get made. In the case of Texas’s recent adoption program, however, there was a definite sense that the state board almost enjoyed making a trio of large corporations jump through hoops; they knew theirs was the only large contract up for grabs at the time and they made the publishers work hard for it. Beyond that, they juiced the companies for many “extras” free of charge. Certain large school districts, for example, promised to buy textbook lines only if companies would include online products for free. This is good bargaining from the taxpayer’s perspective, but it’s far from ideal for the publishers creating the content. I won’t say that the companies cut corners, but I will concede that it was nearly impossible to fill Texas’s orders with the knowledge that the products being delivered would be as accurate and well-designed as possible. Staffing constraints, capricious revisions, and (essentially) forced free giveaways of materials placed the companies under enormous strain.
Substantive, content-based revisions late in the production process are rare, but more strictly cosmetic changes aren’t uncommon. A company’s ability to act on change requests quickly and cost-effectively is often the truest test of its bid’s strength.
MC: What are some differences between textbook publishing and other aspects of the publishing industry?
J: I don’t know much about the trade paperback industry, for example, but I’d say that educational publishing is unlike most other spheres of the wider publishing industry. This is mainly due to the fact that it operates with but a few clients (with whom it negotiates and re-negotiates the specifications of products, a process that clouds conventional notions of supply and demand) and in accordance to a production cycle that stretches out over years, not weeks or months. It also requires many, many more people to produce even a single volume of a grade 1 reading textbook than it does to ready the latest Danielle Steel novel for release—and try though they might, state boards of education have no recourse to edit Danielle Steel.
One factor that will affect all corners of the industry in coming years is the rise of technology like the iPad and other interactive learning tools. Educational publishing companies have an advantage trade paperback companies don’t in that they hold the rights to an almost immeasurably vast cache of proprietary content that companies like Apple or Promethean (a manufacturer of electronic whiteboards) would love to license, and for a pretty penny. So we’re likely to see an increasing number of strategic partnerships between companies like Apple and the one I worked for in the coming years, through which hardware and educational content will be delivered jointly. If such partnerships don’t happen—and they might not, as education companies are reluctant to share their content—the supposed death of print may be farther off than predicted.
